Bunni Dybniss LCSW, certified care manager and Director of Professional Services at Livhome , a national geriatric care management agency, and I wrote an article explaining why a geriatric care manager can be a key defense against financial elder abuse. I am going to repeat some of the article we wrote for the web site of the National Association of Professional Geriatric Care Managers

What can a geriatric care manager do to protect elderly clients and their families against financial abuse? Plenty.

As the geriatric care managers earns the trust of older clients and family members, they are well positioned to monitor signs of specific family members taking financial advantage of older people’s money. Geriatric care managers are vigilant in opening the conversation if they suspect a family member is changing their financial relationship with an older adult. It is not uncommon, especially during this economic downturn, for a desperate adult child to play on their parent/child relationship and manipulate parents into providing financial support. This is often well beyond what the elder can afford often jeopardizing their own financial stability. If the Geriatric care manager detects potential financial manipulation they are required as mandated to report the situation to Adult Protective Services. They can involve an elder law attorney, with expertise in this field, trusted family members and community resources, including local Fiduciary Abuse Specialist Team that can work to protect the older person and maintain the family integrity. In addition to looking at this as a way of protecting the older adult, family therapy or mediation often can delve more successfully into resolutions to on-going family pathology.

Geriatric care managers can provide protections against unrelated friends or acquaintances or private caregivers committing undue influence, one the most insidious and legally complicated forms of elder fiscal abuse. This alarm bell for elder abuse occurs when an individual who is stronger or more powerful gets a weaker individual to do something that the weaker person would not have done otherwise. That stronger person, often a caregiver, family member, friend or confidence man, uses various techniques or manipulations, over time, to gain power and compliance. Caregivers can do this because the older person is dependent on them for care and emotional support. This makes this relationship potentially deadly. Family members can set up this same scenario and take advantage of an older person by slowly controlling and isolating them from other family and friends. . Caregiver’s often set up schemes of undue influence if there is no one monitoring an older person. They then take advantage of this lack of monitoring by bilking the older person of large amounts of money, changing their estate or supporting their own family at the expense of the elder. . Undue influence is one of the two most common grounds for contesting a will of estate. In the role of geriatric care manager the geriatric care managers can reduce the dependence on one individual by making sure there is more that one unrelated caregiver on the case, and provide other outside supports to assure the elder there are many people available to provide for their wellbeing. Not only can the geriatric care managers reduce the fears and dependency of the elder, but also they can potentially preserve the family estate so it goes where it rightfully belongs.

By reducing their access to the older person, geriatric care managers can protect clients against con artists, door-to-door salesmen, mail and telemarketing schemes purporting to offer the opportunity to “get rich quick.” Geriatric care managers can set up systems to screen mail and telephone calls for the vulnerable older adult. When the situation is extreme, this often means diverting mail to a trusted relative, professional or post office box and only introducing appropriate mail to the elder. Geriatric care managers can engage older people in daily activities and enjoyable social engagements to combat the lonesomeness that often leads to elders seeking out the crooks that offer free lunches, companionship and other enticements.

Geriatric care managers are knowledgeable about the symptoms of elder abuse so they can respond proactively and reduce the damage to these victims. Starting with an assessment that identifies the red flags, a plan of care can be developed, as we do for any other need. Fiscal elder abuse can be avoided by treating the isolation and loneliness that older people often suffer. Unlike in the past, families often live long distance, are pre-occupied with their own work and family commitments and are not there to monitor their older relatives.

Geriatric care managers as their surrogates are well positioned to step in to protect older and dependent adults from those who prey on the vulnerability of this population. Geriatric care managers are able to arrange daily activities that meet the elders’ interests, preferences and social needs. Care managers can be there to introduce new routines, make sure they get there and monitor whether the plan is successful.

Geriatric care managers are well positioned to not only enhance the lives of seniors, but also prevent elder abuse. So if you suspect elder abuse with a loved , investigate hiring a geriatric care manager. Find one on their web site today.

In my book Handbook of Geriatric Care Managers 3rd edition , I researched is elder abuse and how a family caregiver may be stopped from falling off that violent edge. One way tohelp prevent elder abuse is engaging a professional to assess family caregivers’ needs and finding respite services and other support services in the community.

Stress is a big factor with caregivers. A study done by Schultz and Beach in 1999, called the “Caregiver Effects Study,” revealed the spectral finding that family caregivers who experienced the greatest levels of stress were 64% more likely to die within the next four years than non-caregivers. The strain of caring sometimes ends in elder abuse, for certain family caregivers like siblings—although certainly not all.

Carmen and Barbara Morano, in their article “Applying the Stress, Appraisal and Coping Framework to Geriatric Care Management,” published in the GCM Journal, Spring 2007, have applied the stress, appraisal, and coping framework to assessing the caregiver burden. They state that there is a lot of research that tells us that this grid can be used to understand stress in family caregivers, predict how family caregivers react to the stress and burden of care, and design solutions to that help family caregivers manage the stress of caring for a loved one.

Caregiver stress—its origins, how to relieve it—is one of the most important reasons for a professional in the field of aging , like a geriatric care manager http://www.caremanager.org/should assess family caregivers and hear their pain. It isn’t just the ill or disabled older family member who should be the focus of ageriatric care managersocial worker, nurse, or helping professional . Professionals on aging also need to zero in on the family caregiver. Caregiver burden many times equals caregiver stress, and when too much strain builds up in the caregiver, a person can be so knocked off balance he or she may not be able to care for either the client or him- or herself any longer. If a family member is caring for another older family member, the burden of that care, like bundles of lead on the back of a pack animal, can get heavier and heavier until the animal crumbles to the ground. Family caregivers are like that—they collapse sometimes,elder abuse occurs, Adult Protective Services is called in and the result is sometimes nursing home placement for their spouse or relative.

This even happened to Mickey Rooney. A new documentary Last Will and Embezzlement, a documentary starring Hollywood icon Mickey Rooney about the financial exploitation of the elderly. See the You Tube trailor

Are you a baby boomer, a sibling and worried about retirement, a parent’s death or a blood thirsty fight with siblings over inheritance. Or do you just need some financial guidance among you and your baby boomer siblings over financial matters in your aging family? There is an excellent radio show covering this-

I was interviewed this week for the show on many of these baby boomer-sibling issues. The show will be aired on and if you are in the east coast tune in. As I frequently do ,I refer to geriatric care managers, financial planners to help aging families with inheritance issues?

Financial abuse does happen in families among siblings and adult children

The terrible truth is the worst perpetrators are not professional con artists. The most dangerous elder financial abusers aren’t folks running a scam like Bernie Madoff or crooks offering free lunches to retirees then swindling their money .The most vicious financial abusers are most frequently the older person’s own family adult children and midlife siblings/ .

All we have to do is look at the infamous Brooke Astor case, where a geriatric care manager was actually involved to help the court with this infamous case.

I also highly recommend the book Mrs. Astor Regrets by Meryl Gordon Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2008.

Mrs. Astor lived to be 105 and was a storied philanthropist. She gave her entire Foundation away to great causes, many in New York. Her 83 year old, only child ( no siblings ) -was indicted on charges of robbing her estate of millions. The story catalogs three generations of a quintessential dysfunctional family, who use the treacherous tools wielded by these kin to eat away at each other, in a bloody multigenerational family war.

They even produce art that tells the ultimate dysfunctional family story, when Philip Astor, the accused son, teams with his devious wife, to produce a revival Long Days Journey Into Night, on Broadway. I personally consider this play the ultimate dysfunctional family story. The allegations of undue influence, where new wills are signed by elderly Mrs. Astor when she may not have the capacity to legally sign, are pure elder fiscal abuse material. This novel makes make the stiff dry legal morass of undue influence, a compelling read and the swirl of probate attorneys, elder law attorneys, conservatorships and even a geriatric social worker who acts like a geriatric care manager, in the end, create pure theater for our aging profession.

A survey of State Adult Protective Abuse of Adults Over Sixty showed that the most common fiscal abuser was a son or daughter. Adult children perpetrated 33 % of the fiscal exploitation substantiated by APS. Other family members were the next biggest group of fiscal abusers investigated by APS. These other kin represented almost 22% of the financial abuser reported nationwide to adult protective services.

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Cathy Cress is the leading national expert in Aging Life and Geriatric Care Management. She is author of Handbook of Geriatric Care Management 4th edition, Jones and Bartlett, published 2015 and known as the bible of geriatric care management. Continue Reading >